New Technology Vaccines Compatibility

Abstract

Poultry vaccinology is currently entering a new era that will strongly and deeply modify the ways vaccines are perceived, conceived and used to control or prevent health issues in poultry populations.

This new situation is the consequence of 3 major changes that both poultry and vaccine industries are undergoing.

The first one comes from the recent pre-eminence of the process over production itself: labour issues and consequent increasing automation in the hatcheries and in farms that have dramatically reduced possibilities to intervene directly on chickens.

The second change comes from the fact that, because of economical or sanitary justifications, vaccination is now pragmatically recognized as an unavoidable part of the production process, at the same level as bio-security and management.

The third change comes from the new and huge opportunities offered by new technologies for developing vaccines, as well as fantastic capabilities corresponding vaccines have revealed.

Step by step, vaccines and vaccinations are leaving farms to pile up at the only two possible entry ports of the production process: hatchery, for all birds, and transfer from rearing to production facilities, for long living birds only.

Vaccines and vaccinations are now requested by producers to integrate the production process at these levels, so that, for vaccines producers, other offerings will just find no market.

Then it is easy to understand that if, in the near future, all vaccines are to be given at the same time, research needs to focus on selecting vaccines that are, at least, not interfering one with each others, developing multivalent vaccines, investigating new immunization concepts, running compatibility studies, as well as designing corresponding necessary automated vaccination equipments.

All this innovation activity is nowadays dominated by the imperious need for “compatibility” and encompasses various processes including investigation, selection, validation, decision, adaptation, monitoring, etc., all necessary to ensure that objective of controlling or preventing diseases issues is also reached.

Going this way, we have demonstrated compatibility between Cevac Transmune, an Immune Complex vaccine to prevent Infectious Bursal Disease and Vectormune ND, an rHVT-ND Vector vaccine to prevent Newcastle disease. Other experiments have demonstrated compatibility between rFP and rHVT Vector vaccines, when others have yielded variable results regarding compatibility between different rHVT Vector vaccines.

Main data and conclusions related to these experiments will be presented at the occasion of this symposium.